Tim Allen Once Blogged About the Perils of Capitalism and the Need for a ‘Maximum Wage’

Tim Allen is obviously famous for his work in stand-up comedy, TV sitcoms and snitching, but back at the dawn of the century, the Santa Clause star was super into blogging.

After Home Improvement wrapped up in 1999, Allen likely had a lot more free time on his hands. And he seemingly devoted much of that time to carving out a space for himself on the burgeoning information superhighway. 

Allen’s official website, TimAllen.com, didn’t just contain tour dates and low-res JPEGs, it was chock-full of bonus Tim Allen content, including his own personal blog posts. After all, Allen was a published author, having penned best-selling tomes such as Don't Stand to Close to a Naked Man. Some of these blogs went to some unexpected places. Like, instead of posting about power tools or sports or just typing out phonetic translations of grunting sounds, Allen transcribed his musings about economic theory?

As shared by the “popculturediedin2009” social media account, in 2006, Allen published a mini-essay entitled “Capitalism,” in which he critiqued late capitalism for “encouraging class division” and fostering a “subtle kind of non-morality,” which is a weird take coming from the Republican who made roughly 500 Christmas movies for the Walt Disney corporation.

Allen suggested exploring “alternative ideas to capitalism” and even proposed imposing a federal salary cap, not unlike in some sports leagues. So Allen was basically supporting the concept of a “maximum wage” which, as Vox once pointed out, would “definitely help solve inequality.”

And yet, somehow writing about marginally progressive economic policies wasn’t the weirdest thing about the old TimAllen.com. His website also contained a forum, known as “Tim Allen’s Idea Exchange.” As reported by The Verge, the message boards were divided into categories such as “The Testosterone Corner” (for discussions about tools and cars and the like) and “Mac Attack” (for people who wanted to discuss Apple products on a site run by the guy from Jungle 2 Jungle).

There was also a spot for bro-friendly relationship posts called “Men & Women — Half a Mystery,” which accrued just “21 threads” in 11 years. There was also “The Really Big Questions” where Allen instructed his fans to “exchange your ideas on God, spirituality, philosophy and wisdom." Depressingly, at least one post was all about how there’s seemingly no point to life, aside from the comedy of Tim Allen.

Somehow things got even stranger from there. Poking around the remnants of the site, it seems that Allen once posted a crude animation of his digital avatar, or “T’Avatar,” who basically looked like a yassified Nintendo GameCube character. And to prove that he wasn’t real, Allen’s T’Avatar let his pupil fall out of his eyeball, and held it out using his tongue. 

Was Guillermo del Toro Allen’s web designer? What is even happening here?